Submissions

By long-standing tradition, all submissions of names, devices and badges must be printed on paper, copied multiple times for distribution to multiple administrative bodies within the College of Arms, hand-coloured with the approved colouring methods, and — you know what? Tradition isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Under the new changes to the submissions process, you can now make submissions on paper or by email. All that stuff about multiple copies is now out of date too. Here are the new rules.

General Submission Guidelines

Consult with a herald! Don’t try to run the whole gauntlet yourself! A herald will make sure your name and armory are plausible, registrable and not in conflict. If you want to call yourself Thor the Thunderer, Wendy of the Purple Unicorns or Cornelius von Becke, a herald will be able to tell you why that’s not going to work before you get too attached to it.

Documentation is good, but too much documentation is bad. Please check Appendix H and see if the source you are using is included there. If it is, don’t bother including copies; just give the bibliographical information and a page number and the commenting heralds will sort it out. Otherwise, please copy only the relevant pages. If your source is a four hundred page book that mentions your information three times, you won’t need more than three pages: the title page of the book and the page(s) on which the information is found. Don’t copy whole books, chapters or theses.

Don’t rely on your own skills to check for conflict against existing registrations. Conflict-checking is tricky. Ask your herald to do this bit. If your herald is shaky on conflict-checking too, there are other resources, listed below. Use them!

Don’t use calligraphy. The submission forms need to be readable. They’re going to be scanned and then the paper will be thrown away. Don’t waste your effort; save it for when the whole thing is registered and it’s time to start using it!

Submissions don’t cost you anything. They do cost the College of Heralds a small administrative fee, but the kingdom has generously decided to cover that, so it costs you nothing. We end up spending a couple of hundred dollars a year on that, but it saves dozens of heralds having to handle money, which was always a nightmare (and still is, in less generous kingdoms).

Ignore the stuff on the forms telling you how many copies you need. Forms take time to redesign. This website is the definitive statement on all matters of heraldic bureaucracy in the kingdom of Lochac.

Paper and Electronic Submissions

Please see the following pages for information on methods for preparing and submitting your name, badge, or device:

What Happens Next

When your submission is received by Rocket, whether paper or electronic, she will check it for errors. If there are errors, she will attempt to contact your consulting herald to get them fixed. Presuming this succeeds (hint: make sure the email addresses are accurate and clear!) she will put your submission onto the next month’s Kingdom Letter of Intent. The heralds of Lochac will then have a month to discuss it, with the goal of improving its chances for registration.

If it survives this commentary period, it will be placed on the Letter of Intent and the whole College of Arms, all nineteen kingdoms worth of heralds, will get a chance to comment. This is basically the same process as the Kingdom version, but it takes two months and is considerably more authoritative.

After that, it will be judged by the Laurel Sovereign of Arms and his or her staff: Pelican Sovereign of Arms who handles names, and Wreath Sovereign of Arms who handles armory. The Sovereigns have monthly meetings, during which they go through all the submissions from every kingdom.

With the deciding done, it falls to the Laurel Clerk to cross-check and verify everything, and collate the discussion notes into a concise form called a Letter of Acceptance and Return. This takes a couple of months.

When this letter is published, Crux Australis hears about it, and publishes it on the Lochac Announce mailing list, the Blazons mailing list, the Lochac Heraldry Chat group on Facebook, and in the next Crux Australis Monthly Electronic Letter in Pegasus.

So break it down: if it’s the middle of January and you send your submission to Rocket, it will go on the KLoI for February. If it passes that test, it goes on the February LoI which is discussed in March and April. In early May, the Sovereigns rule on it. Laurel Clerk then works on LoAR during May and June, and around the tenth of July it’s published. If you’re subscribed to the various lists or groups, that’s when you hear about it; otherwise, Pegasus comes out late in July and you can read about it there.

If you want to see where your submission is up to, there’s a status page on the heralds’ commentary website. You don’t need a login to follow that link.

Paperwork

Here are the downloading forms for all sorts of submission types, including ones that we don’t currently support electronic submissions with. That will change in time. * The Adobe form versions are a trial and there is no guarantee they will be accepted at the Laurel level. Use at your own risk, and save as a non-form version (print as PDF).

The various Standard Form Letters – including Permission to Conflict, Blanket Permission to Conflict, Heraldic Will, and a variety of others.

Resources

You can’t do this on your own. Here are some resources to make it easier.

The Lochac Heraldry Chat group on Facebook is, if you don’t mind subscribing to the Blue And White Borg, an excellent resource for learning and improving your heraldic skills. Heralds from all over the kingdom and the wider known world participate, and it is responsible for some truly brilliant heraldry in the kingdom in the years since it was created.

The Blazons mailing list is the place for heralds to talk more seriously and privately. Every rostered herald is expected to subscribe, and it’s how Crux Australis communicates officially with the College of Heralds.

The Lochac Roll of Arms is Master William Castille’s mighty project to display the arms of every single Lochacian. It’s not the place to go for inspiration to design your own arms — too much older SCA heraldry is truly awful — but it is definitely the best resource for seeing the link between blazon and emblazon (ie between the words and the pictures).